Hearing status characteristics relevant for everyday life in adults (ALLSTAT)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Inga Holube
• Subject Area: Otolaryngology, Phoniatrics and Audiology ; Acoustics ; Medical Physics, Biomedical Technology
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 509737976

Auditory communication shapes the everyday life of almost all people. Whether or not communications are successful depends to a large extent on the hearing abilities of the communication partners involved in conjunction with technical-acoustic factors. In order to be able to fully evaluate the expected and realized everyday benefits of hearing rehabilitation measures or to normatively specify technical-acoustic requirements, e.g. in human-machine interaction, the hearing abilities in the general population as well as in different social groups must be precisely described. Population-based surveys provide the necessary database, granted that the chosen research methods are suitable to capture the hearing status in its dimensions relevant to everyday life. For ALLSTAT with projected 2,000 participants, a survey program was designed that combines established and commonly used test methods with procedures whose potential for characterizing everyday life abilities has been demonstrated by basic research but has not been realized so far in population studies. Methods will be compared to derive new standards for measurement procedures that can improve the ecological validity of hearing assessment in the future. Such an enhanced audiological-acoustic assessment profile can be of great use for a variety of applications such as specification of hearing aids, noise assessment, population-based hearing research, and as a realistic benchmark for rehabilitation. Considering the importance of speech understanding in ambient noise, the lack of reliable data from typical populations is striking. Therefore, age- and gender-specific reference values are to be determined for all test methods used. The proposed study builds on the applicant’s own relevant work and her expertise in epidemiological hearing research, method development, and standardization. She conducted the study HÖRSTAT (2010-2012). The results of this study allowed for the first time a comparison with international studies and, among others, were fully included into the revision of ISO 7029. In order to perform longitudinal analyses of selected parameters, participants from this previous study will be invited again, additionally to newly recruited participants. To further increase the scope of ALLSTAT, methodological links to large population studies currently conducted in Germany are planned. In this way, the collected data can be supplemented by further health-related and, when applicable, socio-demographic factors. This in turn allows to evaluate the extent to which the results can be generalized to the German adult population.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants